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God created the real numbers

(www.ethanheilman.com)
136 points Bogdanp | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.439s | source
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andrewla ◴[] No.45067770[source]
I'm an enthusiastic Cantor skeptic, I lean very heavily constructivist to the point of almost being a finitist, but nonetheless I think the thesis of this article is basically correct.

Nature and the universe is all about continuous quantities; integral quantities and whole numbers represent an abstraction. At a micro level this is less true -- elementary particles specifically are a (mostly) discrete phenomenon, but representing the state even of a very simple system involves continuous quantities.

But the Cantor vision of the real numbers is just wrong and completely unphysical. The idea of arbitrary precision is intrinsically broken in physical reality. Instead I am off the opinion that computation is the relevant process in the physical universe, so approximations to continuous quantities are where the "Eternal Nature" line lies, and the abstraction of the continuum is just that -- an abstraction of the idea of having perfect knowledge of the state of anything in the universe.

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NoahZuniga ◴[] No.45068389[source]
You know it wouldn't be possible for us to tell the difference between a rational universe (one where all quantities are rational numbers) and a real universe (one where you can have irrational quantities).

The standard construction for the real numbers is to start with the rationals and "fill in all the holes". So why even bother with filling in the holes and instead just declare God created the rationals?

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1. vessenes ◴[] No.45073728[source]
To a mathematician saying god created the integers is the same thing as saying god created the rationals: there’s a bijection between the rationals and integers.

I’m not convinced that we could have our current universe without irrationals - wouldn’t things like electromagnetism and gravity work differently if forced to be quantized between rationals? Saying ‘meh it would be close enough’ might be correct but wouldn’t be enough to convince me a priori.

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2. tomasson ◴[] No.45075312[source]
Yeah this is an understatement. Modern technology and the world economy require irrational numbers